Assessment of myocardial sympathetic innervation by PET in patients with heart failure: a review of the most recent advances and future perspectives

Life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias (VA) are a major cause of death in patients with congestive heart failure (HF). Among various factors, the sympathetic nervous system may give rise to VA in several pathophysiological pathways due to an impaired function of presynaptic sympathetic nerve terminals. Positron emission tomography (PET) with labeled catecholamine analogues represents a reliable tool to assess the sympathetic innervation activity. This review aims at summarising the most relevant and recent literature findings on the current role of PET in the evaluation of cardiac sympathetic activity in patients with heart failure. A comprehensive literature search strategy using PubMed databases was carried out looking for articles on the role of Positron emission tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) in the assessment of myocardial sympathetic innervation in patients with heart failure. The literature search limited to the last 5 years retrieved 40 papers. Most of the papers dealt with PET studies with 11C-HED. 19 pre-clinical, first-in-human and clinical studies highlighting the current role of PET and future perspectives resulted eligible for inclusion in the present review. The assessment of myocardial sympathetic activity in patients with heart failure with PET will play a pivotal role in clinical practice. Its capability to predict the occurrence of life-threatening VA and the effectiveness of resynchronization therapy makes this technique ideal in the era of personalized medicine

Electrical Power Subsystem for the Euclid Spacecraft

European Space Agency in the frame of Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program [ 1 ]. It is a cosmology mission whose prime objective is to study the geometry and the nature of the dark matter and the dark energy with unprecedented accuracy. The spacecraft will be launched in 2020 by a Soyuz launcher, to perform a six-year survey of the extragalactic sky from a large-amplitude orbit around Lagrange point L2 of the Sun-Earth system. This paper outlines the Euclid Electrical Power Subsystem (EPS) design, providing a description of the major design drivers and resulting configuration, with a view to highlight aspects that could be considered for future designs

The relationship between emotions, beliefs, and pro-environmental behaviors in young adults through the lens of self-determination theory

Understanding the variables that promote pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) can be useful for sustainable development. Research has shown that several factors, including emotions, can influence PEBs. Eco-empathy and helplessness beliefs toward the environment (HBTE) can facilitate or discourage PEBs. To understand the role of these factors, it may be interesting to study their connection with different emotion regulation strategies suggested by Self-Determination Theory. The current study sought to test a model that could explain the associations of dysregulation, suppressive regulation, and integrative regulation with eco-empathy, HBTE, and PEBs. In a sample of 305 emerging adults, we found an association between integrative regulation and eco-empathy, dysregulation, and HBTE. The analyses revealed an indirect pathway from integrative regulation to PEBs through eco-empathy, suggesting the need to implement educational and informational programmes that consider the impact of emotional constraints on PEB implementation in the younger generation.peer-reviewe

Editorial: Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders: Physiological and molecular evidence

[no abstract available

Can We Predict Skeletal Lesion on Bone Scan Based on Quantitative PSMA PET/CT Features?

Objective: The increasing use of PSMA-PET/CT for restaging prostate cancer (PCa) leads to a patient shift from a non-metastatic situation based on conventional imaging (CI) to a metastatic situation. Since established therapeutic pathways have been designed according to CI, it is unclear how this should be translated to the PSMA-PET/CT results. This study aimed to investigate whether PSMA-PET/CT and clinical parameters could predict the visibility of PSMA-positive lesions on a bone scan (BS). Methods: In four different centers, all PCa patients with BS and PSMA-PET/CT within 6 months without any change in therapy or significant disease progression were retrospectively selected. Up to 10 non-confluent clear bone metastases were selected per PSMA-PET/CT and SUVmax, SUVmean, PSMAtot, PSMAvol, density, diameter on CT, and presence of cortical erosion were collected. Clinical variables (age, PSA, Gleason Score) were also considered. Two experienced double-board physicians decided whether a bone metastasis was visible on the BS, with a consensus readout for discordant findings. For predictive performance, a random forest was fit on all available predictors, and its accuracy was assessed using 10-fold cross-validation performed 10 times. Results: A total of 43 patients were identified with 222 bone lesions on PSMA-PET/CT. A total of 129 (58.1%) lesions were visible on the BS. In the univariate analysis, all PSMA-PET/CT parameters were significantly associated with the visibility on the BS (p < 0.001). The random forest reached a mean accuracy of 77.6% in a 10-fold cross-validation. Conclusions: These preliminary results indicate that there might be a way to predict the BS results based on PSMA-PET/CT, potentially improving the comparability between both examinations and supporting decisions for therapy selection

16,16-Dimethyl Prostaglandin E-2 Efficacy on Prevention and Protection from Bleomycin-Induced Lung Injury and Fibrosis

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The Digitalization of Bioassays in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Background: Recent years are seeing a growing impetus in the semantification of scholarly knowledge at the fine-grained level of scientific entities in knowledge graphs. The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG, orkg.org) represents an important step in this direction, with thousands of scholarly contributions as structured, fine-grained, machine-readable data. There is a need, however, to engender change in traditional community practices of recording contributions as unstructured, non-machine-readable text. For this in turn, there is a strong need for AI tools designed for scientists that permit easy and accurate semantification of their scholarly contributions. We present one such tool, ORKG-assays. Implementation: ORKG-assays is a freely available AI micro-service in ORKG written in Python designed to assist scientists obtain semantified bioassays as a set of triples. It uses an AI-based clustering algorithm which on gold-standard evaluations over 900 bioassays with 5,514 unique property-value pairs for 103 predicates shows competitive performance. Results and Discussion: As a result, semantified assay collections can be surveyed on the ORKG platform via tabulation or chart-based visualizations of key property values of the chemicals and compounds offering smart knowledge access to biochemists and pharmaceutical researchers in the advancement of drug development

An Explainable AI System for Automated COVID-19 Assessment and Lesion Categorization from CT-scans

COVID-19 infection caused by SARS-CoV-2 pathogen is a catastrophic pandemic outbreak all over the world with exponential increasing of confirmed cases and, unfortunately, deaths. In this work we propose an AI-powered pipeline, based on the deep-learning paradigm, for automated COVID-19 detection and lesion categorization from CT scans. We first propose a new segmentation module aimed at identifying automatically lung parenchyma and lobes. Next, we combined such segmentation network with classification networks for COVID-19 identification and lesion categorization. We compare the obtained classification results with those obtained by three expert radiologists on a dataset consisting of 162 CT scans. Results showed a sensitivity of 90\% and a specificity of 93.5% for COVID-19 detection, outperforming those yielded by the expert radiologists, and an average lesion categorization accuracy of over 84%. Results also show that a significant role is played by prior lung and lobe segmentation that allowed us to enhance performance by over 20 percent points. The interpretation of the trained AI models, moreover, reveals that the most significant areas for supporting the decision on COVID-19 identification are consistent with the lesions clinically associated to the virus, i.e., crazy paving, consolidation and ground glass. This means that the artificial models are able to discriminate a positive patient from a negative one (both controls and patients with interstitial pneumonia tested negative to COVID) by evaluating the presence of those lesions into CT scans. Finally, the AI models are integrated into a user-friendly GUI to support AI explainability for radiologists, which is publicly available at http://perceivelab.com/covid-ai

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

Two Birds with One Stone: Hepatocellular Carcinoma and Small Cell Lung Cancer Imaged with [¹⁸F]Fluorocholine Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography

We describe the case of a 67-year-old male patient with a moderately differentiated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) of the right liver lobe who underwent [18F]fluorocholine positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) for staging due to a suspicious lung lesion at previous CT scan. [18F]fluorocholine PET/CT showed increased radiopharmaceutical uptake in a liver lesion corresponding to the known HCC. Furthermore, a right pulmonary hilar lesion suspicious for metastatic spread of HCC showed increased radiopharmaceutical uptake. Surprisingly, the histological assessment of the thoracic lesion demonstrated the presence of small cell lung cancer (SCLC). The patient underwent treatment with radiation therapy and chemotherapy for the SCLC and selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) for the HCC. The patient died after one year due to progressive SCLC. This case demonstrates that coexisting tumors showing increased cell membrane turnover, including SCLC, can be detected by [18F]fluorocholine PET/CT. In our case, [18F]fluorocholine PET/CT findings influenced the patient management in terms of histological verification and different treatment of the detected lesions